2018 ARCHIVE ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS

2018 Archive Achievement Awards: meet the winners!

At the 2018 FIAT/IFTA World Conference in Venice the Archive Achievement Awards were attributed to three particularly interesting projects, outstanding archival initiatives that have improved significantly the ways in which the archives are preserved, managed and used.

The FIAT/IFTA Archive Achievement Awards yearly reward initiatives bringing the professional preservation and management of audiovisual archives to a higher level. The Archive Achievement Awards are developed by FIAT/IFTA, the international federation of television archives. Members of FIAT/IFTA can nominate their own organisation, or they can nominate a person or organisation with whom they have collaborated to bring the project to a successful end.

This Award rewards archival technology projects which have experimented, developed and implemented new and emerging media management technologies and tools to open up the archives in new and efficient ways. The jury report mentions:

“For the 2018 Excellence in Media Management Award, the jury has chosen for a project that has facilitated annotation as well as archival retrieval. It avoids a waste of footage, time and finances. The proposed way of working is beneficial for everyone involved in the process of searching and using archival material. Furthermore, it is an ambitious project opened to new evolutions in the future. The jury stresses the impact on the whole company: archives, journalists, and production. It strongly appreciates that the project brings the great potential of an artificial intelligence technology to a practically applicable level.”

The Excellence in Media Preservation Award aims to reward projects in the domain of analog or digital preservation, that have successfully developed and implemented a (part of the) preservation process that excels in professionality or innovation. The jury report tells:

“The Media Preservation jury duly notes that all the submitted projects featured compromises between the ideals as set by preservation standards and the sometimes heavy constraints as set by the production needs and unadapted funding. Therefore this award should be considered as an encouragement for the endeavor put in the winning project, more than a full and complete endorsement of its technical specifications. In the winning project, the jury especially appreciates the courage to choose for a lossless master format even in a production context, a choice that not many broadcasters dared to make yet.”

The 2018 FIAT/IFTA Excellence in Media Preservation Award is awarded to ‘Preserving Australian Broadcast History’, by Maddy Kortegast from SBS, Australia.

The Excellence in Archival Use and Valorisation Award focuses on projects that have taken advantage of some or all aspects of archive collections in a digital environment (value assessment, storytelling, copyright and Intellectual Property issues, technology, ethics, user experiences, etc.) in order to increase awareness and grow of the value and use of audiovisual archives worldwide. The 2018 jury report read:

"By interacting directly with the users, the project is taking the value of the archives outside of the vaults. The project proves that scaling down might be of a great value. Stories that might not be relevant for a whole country, can be extremely relevant for a specific community and therefore are worth safeguarding."

The 2018 FIAT/IFTA Excellence in Archival Use and Valorisation Award is awarded to "Your town, your story" by Louise Broch from the DR, Denmark.

Lifetime Honorary Award
Since 2014 FIAT/IFTA every year also gives a special Lifetime Honorary Award to a person who has got special merits for FIAT/IFTA and for the field of audiovisual archiving as a whole. This year the jury honours a man ...

"who’s career started already in 1966, that is 52 years ago. In 1979 he joined the archives department of the broadcaster that he worked for. He would stay in the archives for 20 years. He has lead the installation of the first automated vault of the archive he worked for, already in 1982. Soon enough he became the representative par excellence of the archives department of RAI here in Italy and abroad, with a special interest also for musical archives. From 1982 until 1999 he was active within FIAT/IFTA. As an Executive Council member, a vice-president, a Secretary-General and from 1990 until 1994 as the third president of this federation."

FIAT/IFTA is humbled to hand over this Lifetime Honorary Award to Vittorio Sette of RAI, Italy.